


deadbeat love song

by Kirschli_Kuchen



Category: One Piece
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, M/M, dubious methods of anger management, unfortunately this takes place in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 14:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15438771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirschli_Kuchen/pseuds/Kirschli_Kuchen
Summary: Correlation does not causation make. A tale of meetings and grief.





	deadbeat love song

**Author's Note:**

> ho boy this whole story didn’t work out the way I thought it would at all but I don’t think I’m dissatisfied with the result.  
> [come scream @ me on tumblr](http://kirschlikuchen.tumblr.com/)

1.

“No, no, no, _no_. You don’t understand,” Marco slurs at an equally drunk broad-shouldered man, he’d seen fiddling with a log pose and started a conversation with when he wasn’t yet as off his rocks as he is now. He continues with what is surely a sound and well thought out argument about the nature of cartography and decidedly not an embarrassing garble of words.

“Like hell it isn’t,” the other man counters, although not meanly. They’ve both been entirely too drunk to be anything but squinty-eyed mellow three drinks ago so now is just lip service.

A behemoth of a man is leaning back against the bar on the other side of the smashed navigator apparently having the time of his life, heavy lidded gaze trained squarely on Marco, a broad grin dimpling his cheeks. Marco narrows an eye at him, something about the curved mustache pinging faintly in the back of his mind but it’s forgotten as soon as the man between them opens his mouth again.

His memory gets even more spotty after that last island of questionable clarity.

He remembers the behemoth standing between his spread legs (a hot flash of something Marco can’t quite parse), one of his giant hands gently cradling Marco’s clothed shoulder and the other taking the tumbler out of his slack hand and throwing it back himself.

“Hey, you good?” - “Yeah. Yeah. Yes.”

The swaying streetlights dancing in front of his eyes like he’s gently rocking back and forth on the waves.

A glass of water, full and sweet and a balm for his parched throat.

The warm embrace of his bed, sheets soft and worn.

A cool hand prodding him into position and settling for one heavenly, breathless moment over his overheated eyes.

 

Marco wakes up, hung over all the way from Wednesday, with the sun on his face in his cramped apartment.

He goes through the motions of morning, drinking more water than he can remember ever drinking in such a short amount of time and pissing like a racehorse. Breakfast is fast and tasteless and eaten over his kitchen sink.

It takes some time before his eyes land on the note left on his tiny kitchen table.

‘ _Come with us_ ’ are the words that stick in his mind the entire day, warping until they sound a lot like ‘ _come home_ ’ to him.

The timeline is a week, so he packs his bag in that night stuffing all the clothing he owns, two inkwells, paper, a badly whittled wooden horse, and a single dogeared photograph into a neat little package where his life used to be.

Two letters sit on his table, waiting patiently for him to take them to the office, neatly titled ‘letter of resignation’ and ‘termination of living arrangements’ respectively.

 

2.

“Huh,” Marco says, bitter taste of the fruit still on the back of his tongue, his arm having just burst into blue flames.

He’d retreated to the relative privacy of Pops’ quarters so he wouldn’t make as big a fool out of himself, or at least not in front of the crew. Of course Pops himself is here to observe but the crew blessedly keeps outside unless something _really_ important happens.

(The crew had learned that the hard way, after Jozu walked in on them a year or so back when they were getting a bit frisky on the desk.)

So now it’s just him and Pops, figuring out what the heretofore unknown devil’s fruit might do.

Marco waves his other hand through the flames on his left, “It doesn’t feel hot?” he says, trying to puzzle out what use flames that don’t burn might be.

“May I?” Pops asks holding out his hand from where he’s leaning back against his desk and Marco can’t do anything but wordlessly step closer.

Pops doesn’t immediately reach into the flame, but he hovers his hand at a middle distance for a moment before closing in, “Not hot at all,” he says, twinkle of good humor in his eye.

Marco frowns down at his arm.

“So not a logia type fruit,” Pops elaborates, gently carding his fingers through the flames.

“Paramedica, then?” Marco asks strangely hopeful, having never seen an animal wreathed in blue flames, but still questioning what _use_ there could possibly be in generating said flames if they. don’t. _burn_.

Pops makes a considering noise in the back of his throat, lightly tracing the bones of his arm, “Can you turn a bit more of you?”

Marco’s frown deepens but he does as he’s told, his other arm catching fire.

“More?” Pops asks again, catching this arm too and smiling down at him.

Marco is powerless against that smile. So he closes his eyes and concentrates… and _concentrates…_ and bursts into flames all over.

Something shifts.

Pops’ fingers trail over where his elbows used to be and let go of his arms.

 _Oh_ , a part of him thinks, _not a paramedica after all._

He’s a bit smaller than he’d normally be standing up straight but the length of his arms ( _wingspan_ , he thinks faintly) has more than tripled in size.

“A _zoan_ type!” he squawks excitedly only to find out that he’s _actually_ squawking and not speaking, the vocal cords of his new form having not developed for speech. A couple of sheets of paper have fluttered down to the ground after being picked up by a gust from his wings.

Marco focuses himself, ignoring Pops’ happy chuckle at his expense, and turns back into his still slightly fiery self.

“A zoan type,” he repeats a bit more sedately, letting himself get drawn into Pops’ embrace.

“A zoan type,” Pops nods into his hair.

Marco grins up at him.

 

3.

Title: _A rescue in snapshots.  
_

A future (not his).

The legend of the phoenix, but not in any meaningful way.

Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god.

(A death in the family.)

Oh, god no.

 

4.

Yes, they are a family, but _he_ had always been their focal point. The thing they’d all converged and agreed on.

And now he’s gone.

And Marco, for all that he’d been the first mate in all but in so many words feels them slipping through his fingers like sand (or sea salt water).

Marco collects who he can with the care and patience of the mother he’d often been accused of being while his anger paces around his rib cage, restless, a wild beast hungering for revenge. So gives himself a year and at the end of that year, well it’s payback time.

That traitor had inadvertently all but burned the only home he’d ever known to the bottom of the sea, misshapen wooden horse, crooked photograph and all.

It’s only right that he should burn as well.

 

5.

The bell tower tolls midday just as Marco finishes telling old woman Josie that if she would just stop tap dancing for like a week her knee would stop bothering her.

“Yes, yes, Marco-chan,” she says, giving him a hard candy and a pat on the head before she sashays away.

Marco sends her off with a smile and pockets the candy for later. Josie will be back again sometime later this week. Might as well accept it.

He goes back to his log cabin to fix a couple of sandwiches ready and sits down on the log out front to enjoy an unusually timely lunch. The watermill’s clunking away in the background; he should probably change the flour bag after he’s eaten. It’s been about an hour.

Marco regards the scenery with the keen eye of someone who’s seen more sea than solid land for more than half of his life.

It’s… pretty.

Like suddenly asking someone who’s worked with nothing but flowers all his life to classify cats. It’s nothing he’s used to but it’s not- it’s not _bad_ per se.

Just unexpected. And a bit jarring.

But he can power though.

It’s _his_ dream, Marco shouldn’t-

He has to stop himself there. The sandwich turns to cardboard in his mouth. He promised himself he wouldn’t so he pinches the bridge of his nose, rucking his glasses up.

Take a deep breath. Hold it for a second or two. Breathe out through the mouth.

It doesn’t take long before Marco is sick of himself and gets up, taking his sandwiches back to the cabin. He’ll finish them later.

He changes the flour bag, quickly and efficiently, hefting the other onto his shoulder and thinks, _there’s going to be some work to be done in the city. There always is._

 

They tell him recovery is not a straight line from point A to point B, but that ruthlessness is. Marco hasn’t quite figured out what the connection there is but he thinks there has to be one.

There has to.

 

In the end Marco feels tired. An aching weariness drenching his bones, burrowing deeper and deeper.

The decades have not been kind to him and his eyes reflect what his body cannot.

He stays behind the waterfall for as long as they’ll let him. Smiles and mending and protection. But when the next generation comes in and the whispers start he takes back again to the sea for as long as he can stomach it.

(He hasn’t lost his sea legs, it still comes as easy as breathing after all those years, but the thought of being out there, in an ocean without _him_ -)

In no time at all people want him fighting their wars again. He is famously infamous after all.

The former first division commander, Marco the Phoenix himself, looking not a day older than 30, still. Skin unwrinkled, hair a dense tuft, crew insignia snatched in pieces through the half open shirts he prefers.

The only admission to his age a pair of glasses for the nearsightedness even his flames can’t quite seem to cure.

Marco mostly wishes for all of it to stop.

He finds a quiet plot of land, not on the island he’d met _him_ but not off by much, and settles down for a bit of a wait. The gold he’d deposited in some entirely legal accounts under false names should hold him over nicely.

He does exactly _nothing_ for a long while.

It starts… small at first. A strand of white in his already light hair. A fold of skin staying at the corner of his eye even if his face settles back into careful neutrality.

All the while he carefully, _carefully_ does not use the power of his devil fruit even once.

 _It’s better like this,_ he tells himself as his bones start to ache and pop with every movement he makes. As his eyes get worse and worse under the constant strain.

As his mind starts slipping into a time where he was happy and stays there for an indeterminable amount of time.

He doesn’t know if it’s been decades or centuries but he knows that night, as he feels warm embrace of his bed, sheets soft and worn, that this. _This_ right here is just a new beginning.

 

+1

The memory of a cool hand resting on his eyelids comes unbidden and sudden to his mind. He keeps his eyes shut to try and hold onto it it just for a bit longer.

“Welcome home,” an unforgotten voice says to his left.

 _Yes_ , Marco thinks as tears spring to his opening eyes and he turns to grasp to kiss to _hold-_

_Welcome home._


End file.
